The source code for MacPaint, the drawing program with a graphic user interface that shipped with the first Mac in 1984, is going on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California on Tuesday. Apple donated the code, along with the code for QuickDraw, to the museum for academic and historic research.
Apple’s MacPaint has been called one of the most important applications ever written, and QuickDraw made up the foundation of the Mac’s graphic capabilities.
The Computer History Museum’s description of MacPaint:
MacPaint is the drawing program application which interacts with the user, interprets mouse and keyboard requests, and decides what is to be drawn where. The high-level logic is written in Apple Pascal, packaged in a single file with 5,822 lines. There are an additional 3,583 lines of code in assembler language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which implement routines needing high performance and some interfaces to the operating system.
The code for QuickDraw stretches out for 17,101 lines across 36 files and was written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.
Bill Atkinson was instrumental in bringing both MacPaint and QuickDraw to life and played an important role in making the code for both applications available for display at the museum.
[Thanks to BusinessWeek for the heads up.]